


The Hourglass

by casual_tea



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ancient Greece, Dragons, F/M, Horcruxes, M/M, Non-BWL Harry, Twentieth Century London, Unconventional Time Travel, the author promises nothing, things you should sacrifice on the altar of bad ideas
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-16
Updated: 2017-02-16
Packaged: 2018-09-24 21:23:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9787496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/casual_tea/pseuds/casual_tea
Summary: Harry is a cursed wizard who should probably stop getting involved in the lives of others. At the very least, he should probably avoid pregnant witches and dark wizards.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [delicatesammy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/delicatesammy/gifts).



December 31, 1926

 

 

Harry wrapped himself in a blanket and watched embers burn low and orange on the hearth. While he’d eaten dinner in the pub downstairs, someone had come in to stoke the fire, close the heavy window curtains, and leave him an embossed teapot, the contents of which were now cooling on the tray by his bed. He’d already settled his tab, carefully stored his few belongings elsewhere, and left a request for the room to be held for him again next year.

He’d repeat this exact routine tomorrow, if time and fate allowed.

While tomorrow’s sun would rise on the first of January 1926 for the rest of the world, it would only greet him again on the 31st of December. Then again on December 31st 1927, and again on December 31st 1928, and forever on, in a monotonous succession, until he died.

 _More than a quarter of my life,_ he thought dismally. _Two thousand eight hundred and twenty-two December 31sts? Twenty-three?_ He’d lost precise count of the days, but knew they amounted to almost seven years—seven years ago, when that man cursed him and swore Harry would never forget the day.

Well, seven years for _him_ at least. Ironically, the curse outlived the caster.

Faint chimes of clinking glasses and vibrant murmurs to the tune of  _Auld Lang Syne_  carried through the wooden floor, and he let the warmth of other life and possibility lull him to sleep.

He hoped that he wouldn’t startle the owner’s jovial wife when he reappeared; he’d rather find other lodging than obliviate the poor Muggle woman for a third time.

So, Harry slept with the feeble hope that when he closed his eyes in 1925 he’d wake alone in the room on December 31st 1926. He didn’t dare hope for more.

 

Harry awoke to the sting of pure cold, the faint odor of soot, and the musk of sodden wood. He was sprawled in a pile of grubby debris, a broken board prodding his right side. Overhead the unbidden bleary sky of another London winter shone through holes where a thatched roof used to be.

Harry carefully untangled his limbs from the wreckage and silently applauded himself for keeping his expectations low.

An artificial light flashed through a square hole that had once held a small street-front window.

“Oi!” The round face of a middle-aged man replaced the beam of light. “Fella, you can’t sleep here. I know it looks like rubbish, but it’s still private property.”

His silver-badged cap told Harry to proceed with caution.

“Sorry, sir—I’m not a squatter. I was just leaving.” Harry quickly fastened his scarf and long wool coat, to conceal his wizarding robes underneath, leaving only his trousers and shoes visible. After a humiliation involving a toga, Harry kept his clothing simple. If he couldn't keep up with revolution and modernization, he certainly couldn't track changing fashions, particularly muggle designs.

Harry surveyed the remnants of his short-term home. While the roof and much of the interior was gone, the stone exoskeleton remained standing, despite black scars where flame and smoke had lashed against the mortar.

The constable waited impatiently outside to make certain Harry would leave, but Harry was grateful for someone to help him un-wedge the broken front door from its frame, even if the officer grunted under his breath, “Don’t know how you got in here. Oughta left the bloody door open at least.”

 _Still better than a nauseating Apparition_ , Harry thought,  _or the embarrassment of squeezing through the window hole._

With Harry finally free from the building, the constable straightened his dark blue uniform and released the stern reprimanding Harry assumed he’d been bottling up. “I hope you won’t make me do that again. I won’t see you back here, will I?”

“No, sir. I think I’d prefer an inn with a roof.” Harry added quickly, “Do you know if the owners are well? I stayed here a few times while in London…”

Harry wanted to say they were friends, but he’d only known the owners less than a week. Although, they’d technically known Harry for six years, and he supposed that made them friends.

“They were nice,” Harry finished lamely.

“They were nice,” the other man agreed. “And they are well. They went to live with family in York.”

Harry felt genuine relief despite his efforts to remain detached from others. After his family—both of blood and of marriage—had dwindled and decayed, and he had lost touch with any remaining relatives, he had resolved to toughen his heart. But even for a cursed man, longings of love and hope were easy to acquire, and nearly impossible to abandon.

“If you’d like to send them a note, the station will have their address on file,” the officer told him, in a tone that suggested Harry was definitely homeless and would almost certainly be clamoring back into the burnt-out inn later.

“Thank you for your assistance,” Harry replied, and with nothing else to do, he nodded a farewell and began another intrepid search for another inn and another innkeeper that might be willing to hold a room for an indeterminate number of New Year’s Eve’s.

 

Harry retrieved a wand and some muggle coins he’d stowed behind the loose brick of an off-street workhouse. Inconvenient as it was, at least the curse allowed him to keep his clothes.

 _It could_ always _be worse_ , he reminded himself.

Starting each day nude would certainly increase the number of people to obliviate at least ten-fold, not to mention attracting magical authorities and overzealous healers.

Harry displaced his morose thoughts with distractions of the city: Contiguous stores, homes, offices, and even a cinema; men in bowler hats and fitted suit jackets, ladies in pleated and tiered skirts, glossy automobiles, expanding streets, and the microworld of Londoners brimming to the very edges of the city. The increasing snowfall thinned the crowds traveling to parties and pubs, but Harry found plenty of amusement in shop windows filled with smartly-dressed seamstress forms and electric-powered appliances.

He was puttering around a new streetlight that navigated automobile traffic when she passed by: A witch, moving at a slow determined pace, garbed in tattered layers. She traveled unnoticed in a city where having the appearance of a beggar was as good as any disillusionment charm.

Harry might have missed her as well, if it weren’t for the thin rivulet of sour magic she left in her wake, draining from her like a newly lanced abscess.

It was not the metallic magic of the dark wizard who had cursed him, bitter like blood and coffee grounds; magic that seemed almost seductive when the caster was a powerful bronze-skinned wizard, and Harry was very young and stupid with a naïve fondness for Greeks and games.

This woman’s magic reeked of fermentation and carbolic acid. She seemed to be moving towards a fixed point, and a wiser wizard might let her pass uninterrupted. A wiser wizard might remain uninvolved. 

 _And maybe in another century,_ Harry thought,  _I’ll be that wizard._

He easily caught up to her, fishing the wand from his coat pocket and casting a warming charm to negate the moisture and chill already saturating their clothes. Even in the mystic glow of streetlamps and gaslight, she lacked physical beauty: limp hair, thin lips, and a wan complexion. She was young, but unremarkable. In another life that might have mattered, but he’d learned the hard way not to judge every tin by its label.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. I just wanted to help.” Neither of her pale blue eyes looked directly at him; their gaze went slightly past his ears, like someone might accost him from outside his periphery. “My name is Harry. Harry Potter.”

“Merope,” she said, so soft and light the sound fluttered away with the snow. If Harry hadn’t seen the warm, white mist of her breath, he would have missed her response entirely.

Her brow suddenly furrowed, her face contorting in pain. She laid a hand on her stomach, a round fabric-covered curve protruding from the rest of her slight frame.

“Oh.  _Oh!_  You’re having a baby. But you knew that,” he added. “You know where to find a doctor, right? I don’t, but maybe I can help you get there?”

Harry thought she might have nodded, but it turned into a painful gasp; she grasped Harry’s forearm tightly. Her thumb pressed on the curse mark hidden beneath his sleeve. She couldn’t have known, but Harry froze until he saw her looking at her own hand on his arm, appearing ashamed of her own need.

Harry thought she looked like a defeatist; someone permanently crippled by burden, to the point they confused happiness with terror and solitude with loneliness. Before she could retract her hand, Harry moved it gently to his shoulder and wrapped his own arm around her smaller frame as he maneuvered beside her.

“Lean on me. I don’t mind.”

Merope trudged on with quiet resolve, one arm entwined with his, her face still angled downward, looking contrite.

The grey clouds thickened above, pressing upon them with heavier snow. Harry paused for a moment to unwrap his scarf, and the woman instinctively stepped away as if she expected Harry to leave her then. Harry tied his scarf lightly around her neck and damp hair. He squeezed her hand reassuringly before tucking it under his arm. The wind against his exposed neck caused his teeth to chatter a bit, but he mustered a brief smile.

“Steady on, then.” And they walked slowly on, two strangers in a winter gloom.

 

Down a narrow street lined with homologous townhouses, a towering brick building waited at the end of the lane. It was the largest property, and the only structure with a forecourt and iron-rod gate, but with no signs or markers, it could have been anything: a hospital, a school, a factory, the suburban home of an unimaginative duke, or a prison, if someone only added bars to the windows.

Despite the nondescript exterior of the place, Harry understood it was their destination. So, when warm fluid trickled out from beneath Merope’s garments into a slushy puddle on the pavement and she bowed in pain, Harry cast a wordless spell to make her lighter and scooped her into his arms, carrying her through the gate.

Harry rang the doorbell with his elbow. A pretty girl with a ring of keys fastened to her skirt answered the door. She blinked at Harry, no doubt taking in his normally unruly hair, further battered by wind and covered in melting snow, a woman racked with labor pains in his arms.

“Golly.”

“Is there a doctor here?” he asked. To her credit, the girl recovered remarkably fast, ushering them inside the tiled foyer.

“MRS. COLE!” she shouted from the bottom of a central staircase.

“Martha, we don’t yell— _Good lord!_ ” A woman with sharp features, who looked only slightly older than Merope, gasped from the stairs. “Spanish influenza, chicken pox, and now _this_?” she muttered to nobody in particular as she hurried down the steps.

“I’m Harry Potter,” he said. “This is Merope. She’s pregnant.” Merope let out a well-timed cry of pain.

“Not for much longer, I think,” Mrs. Cole replied, looking rather frazzled. “Better set her down. Martha can take her to empty room while I ring for the doctor.” Martha had already disappeared into a doorway and reappeared with two aprons and an arm full of towels. She herded a sluggish Merope down an adjoining hallway.

Mrs. Cole surveyed him. “Are you the father?” Harry shook his head.

“Family?”

“I only met her today, honestly. On the street.”

Mrs. Cole frowned, but her response was kind. “It was good of you to bring her here. We’ll take care of her and the baby.”

She opened the front door for him and a cool wind ruffled their clothes. Harry felt oddly hallowed out, as if he was leaving more behind than his scarf, which had vanished with Merope.

 

He wandered London into the twilight hours, alone and rudderless, before settling into another inn and another pub with the characteristic cattle-related name. He drank amber-colored liquor that warmed his stomach and hummed _The Parting Glass_.

Before the closing of the year, under the night sky, Harry dug a hole the size of a loaf of bread to serve as a makeshift hiding place. He reached into his coat pockets and extracted his muggle coins and two wands. He recognized only one wand. The second wand belonged to a stranger.

He dropped both wands into the hole and smoothed over the dirt. It was too late return the wand tonight. He’d look for Merope tomorrow. He only hoped she’d survive the next three hundred and sixty-four days without her wand.


End file.
